CHAPTER ONE
‘NO LUCIANNA…? Where is she—trying to breathe life into some hopeless wreck of a car?’
Janey Stewart smiled at her husband’s best friend as the three of them shared the informal supper Janey had prepared.
‘No, not this evening, Jake,’ she informed him in response to his wry question about her sister-in-law and the youngest member of the family, the only girl. Lucianna had arrived after her mother had already produced four sons, and, as a consequence of that and, more tragically, of the fact that Susan Stewart had died after contracting a rare and particularly virulent form of viral pneumonia when Lucianna was only eighteen months old, had grown up treated by her brothers and father almost as if she were another boy.
‘She’s out,’ she added in further explanation as he raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Saying goodbye to John.’
‘Saying goodbye…The big romance is over, then, is it?’
‘Not exactly. John’s going to work in Canada for three months. I suspect Lucianna was rather hoping that he might suggest putting their relationship on a bit of a permanent footing before he left.’
‘She hasn’t a hope in hell,’ said David, her husband and Lucianna’s eldest brother, who now ran the farm where he and Lucianna and the rest of the Stewart brothers had been brought up and where in fact Lucianna still lived.
‘She’s never going to get herself a man whilst she goes around dressed in a pair of baggy old dungarees and—’
‘It isn’t all her fault, David,’ Janey interrupted him gently. ‘You and the others have hardly encouraged her to be feminine, have you? And you’ve certainly done your share of helping to frighten away potential men-friends,’ she pointed out mildly.
‘If you mean I’ve made it clear that if a man wants Lucianna to share his roof and his bed with him then it has to be with the benefit of a wedding ring, then what’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ Janey allowed, adding dryly, ‘But I seem to remember you worked pretty hard to convince me that we ought to move in together before we were married…’
‘That was different,’ David told her firmly.
‘I hope this relationship with John does work out for Lucianna,’ Janey continued worriedly. ‘After all, she’s twenty-two now, not a teenager any more.’
‘No relationship is going to work for her until she stops acting like a tomboy…’ David told her decisively, adding, ‘Perhaps you could give her one or two hints, Janey, point her in the right direction.’
‘I’ve tried, but…’ Janey gave a small shrug. ‘I think she needs someone to show her, not to tell her, someone to build up her confidence in herself as a desirable woman and not—’ She broke off and smiled teasingly at her husband’s best friend. ‘Someone like you, Jake,’ she told him.
‘Jake?’ David hooted with laughter. ‘Jake would never look at anyone like Lucianna, not after the women he’s had running after him. Remember that Italian model you went out with, Jake, and that New York banker, and what happened—?’
‘Er…you’re married to me, thank you very much,’ Janey reminded her husband firmly. ‘Perhaps you aren’t the right person, Jake, but she does need help of some kind from someone, otherwise I’m very much afraid she’s going to lose John and she’ll take it very hard.’
‘He really means that much to her?’ Jake frowned, his dark eyebrows snapping together over eyes of a particularly clean and sharp blue-grey colour, all the more striking set against the warm olive of the skin tone he had inherited from his Italian grandmother and the thick dark hair that went with it.
His height and breadth of shoulder he had inherited from his paternal relatives; the great-uncle from whom he had inherited the farm and manor house whose lands bordered on the Stewarts’ farm had been of a similarly impressive build.
‘I rather fear so,’ Janey told him quietly. ‘She needs help, Jake,’ she added, ‘even if she herself would be the last person to admit it, especially…’
‘Especially to me,’ Jake concluded for her.
‘Well, you do rather have the knack of making her bristle,’ Janey smiled.
As the grandfather clock in the passageway struck the hour, Janey’s smile turned to a small frown.
‘John’s flight will be leaving in half an hour and then Lucianna will be back.’
‘Wanting a shoulder to cry on?’ Jake asked Janey perceptively.
‘Luce never cries,’ David informed him. ‘She’s not that type.’
Really there were times when her husband could be maddeningly dense, Janey reflected as she listened to David. One of the reasons Lucianna was such a tomboy, so uncomfortable about showing her emotions, was that as a child she had been taught by her older brothers not to do so.
It was a pity that Lucianna didn’t get on better with Jake because he would certainly have been the ideal person to help her to understand why her relationships with men never developed properly. And it wasn’t just that, as an extraordinarily charismatic and sensual man, he had the experience, the know-how, the awareness to help her, he also rather unexpectedly and, in Janey’s view, very charmingly for such an intensely male man, had a very compassionate and caring side to his nature as well, even though she knew that Lucianna would have begged to differ with her on that score.